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animation027 from The grasshopper problem

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posted on 2017-11-07, 10:34 authored by Olga Goulko, Adrian Kent
We introduce and physically motivate the following problem in geometric combinatorics, originally inspired by analysing Bell inequalities. A grasshopper lands at a random point on a planar lawn of area 1. It then jumps once, a fixed distance d, in a random direction. What shape should the lawn be to maximize the chance that the grasshopper remains on the lawn after jumping? We show that, perhaps surprisingly, a disc-shaped lawn is not optimal for any d > 0. We investigate further by introducing a spin model whose ground state corresponds to the solution of a discrete version of the grasshopper problem. Simulated annealing and parallel tempering searches are consistent with the hypothesis that, for d < π−1/2, the optimal lawn resembles a cogwheel with n cogs, where the integer n is close to π(arcsin (√πd/2))−1. We find transitions to other shapes for dπ−1/2.

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    Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences

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